To tackle climate change we need good data. This data exists; it is published by the International Energy Agency (IEA). But despite being an institution that is largely publicly funded, most IEA data is locked behind paywalls.
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In 2020 we launched a campaign to unlock this data; we started on Twitter (one example), last year we wrote a detailed article about the problem here on OWID, and our letter in Nature.
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The IEA has just announced that it aims to make all of its data and analysis freely available and open-access. This was put forward by the IEA’s executive director, Fatih Birol, and has been approved by its governing board already.
There is one step left. Next month – on February 2nd and 3rd – the IEA will ask for approval from its member countries. That means it is on the governments of the world’s rich countries to make this happen. If they do not approve it, it would be a missed opportunity to accelerate our action on addressing climate change.
This would be a massive achievement. The benefits of closing the small funding gap that remains greatly outweigh the costs.
There is now large support for the IEA data to be freely available – from researchers to journalists; policymakers to innovators. Many have called for the IEA data to be public. Many thanks to everyone who has joined in pushing this forwards – below we share the links to several articles, petitions, and open letters that have made this possible.
→ Open letter to the International Energy Agency and its member countries: please remove paywalls from global energy data and add appropriate open licenses – by Robbie Morrison, Malte Schaefer and the OpenMod community
→ Energy watchdog urged to give free access to government data – Jillian Ambrose, in The Guardian
→ Opening up energy data is critical to battling climate change – Christa Hasenkopf, in Devex
→ Researchers are excited by ‘tantalising’ prospect of open IEA energy data – Joe Lo, in Climate Home
→ Open petition letter: Free IEA Data – A site by Skander Garroum and Christoph Proeschel on which you can write a letter to your country’s government.
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Robin Edgar
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